Friday, July 30, 2004

It seems like every cartoon I watched last weekend parodied something.

First, I watched the new Fairly Oddparents TV Movie entitled Channel Chasers. It had Timmy get fed up with his parents not believing him and deciding to go live forever in the world of TV. This gave the movie a great opportunity to make fun of TV shows, and they did so with abandon. There was the anime parody called “Maho Mushi” which was a combination of Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, Dragon Ball, and Yu Yu Hakusho. Both The Jetsons and The Flintstones were parodied with separate shows. The Jetsons parody, entitled “The Futurellis” was the funnier of the two with its Italian-American family of the future. It was a hilarious combination of Italian stereotypes and The Jetsons. The guy walks his dog around a big rotating pizza instead of a treadmill. The dog gets angry at the cat not because he’s a cat...but because the cat owes him money. Also, there were dead-on parodies of Fat Albert (who says “Yo, Yo, Yo”), Scooby-Doo (who is turned into a dog that sounds more like Snoop Dogg), The Simpsons (with a neighbor who says “Daddily Doodily” and the comment that “the adults were even stupider on this network”), Speed Racer (in a parody that’s even funnier than the one done on Dexter’s Laboratory), Tom & Jerry (complete with cartoonish violence that’s blocked by the characters), Rugrats (with a pooping Timmy), Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer (done in CG, complete with another hilarious poop joke) and Sesame Street (with some of the cheapest looking puppets I’ve ever seen). The Blue’s Clues parody, "Clint’s Hints", is also a standout. I cracked up as Jason Marsden (of Step by Step and various animated series) played the Steve-esque character (he tells the screen that “Despite the shaving cut and five o’clock shadow, I’m really a kid!”). I haven’t seen every episode of Fairly Oddparents, but this one is probably the funniest I’ve ever seen. It even had an almost final episode feel to it with a funny ending that could set up a potential spinoff. All in all, it was great.

Then I watched an episode of Codename: Kids Next Door called “A.R.C.H.I.V.E.” This was the first time I ever actually sat down and watched this show. The parody that this episode had was by far the most unexpected. The episode was a parody of “The Second Renaissance Parts I and II” from The Animatrix. That’s right, the violent set of shorts that act as a prequel to the Matrix films (showing how the situation between machines and humans came about), was parodied by a kids’ show on Cartoon Network. The episode detailed the creation of adults by kids and how adults and children achieved the relationship they have now. If you’ve seen the shorts they are making fun of, the episode is very funny. However, it won’t seem as funny if you aren’t familiar with it.

Lastly, I saw an episode of Megas XLR. This is the show about the two slackers who end up getting a giant robot from the future. In the episode I saw, they were attacked by a misguided group of heroes. The heroes were a parody of the classic anime series Gatchaman (or Battle of The Planets or G Force or Eagle Riders, as they all been known as in America). This episode was pretty funny, although it paled in comparison to the other two parodies I saw.